January 31st – February 7th

The beginning of the second month of the year is here, which is good because little happened in the last day of January. No updates at all. But February was rather interesting from a balance point of view. Also, Gullywash finally got put into the right matchmaking category. What else happened?

Item-wise, the new month was very poor, with the addition of only a few items, in 2012. There were promotional items for Jagged Alliance – Back in Action that pretty much everyone has forgotten about, particularly the ambiguously named Merc Badge. In fact, I only learned just now that the Battle Bob has a second style that includes Soldier’s default helmet. The Map Maker’s Medallion and the Conquistador were also added.

It has a second style! Really!

In early 2009 though, changes were thrown about. First off, new options were added, for hidden view models and custom crosshairs were added. The chance to do crits was changed so they were more based on performance, the default being 2%. Damage spread was also nerfed, from a massive 25% to 10%. Various weapons were tweaked, with miniguns getting less bullet spread, Sniper rifles being made capable of receiving crit boosts, rocket launchers had their reserve ammo boosted to 20 and the Flare Gun was given a 50% damage boost. Interestingly, this update also made it so invisible Spies could no longer pick up the Intelligence.

This week though was hugely important for the competitive side of Team Fortress 2, as it saw the addition of Highlander mode, the game mode where we’re restricted to 9 players per team, one of each class. Speaking of competitive, ETF2L had the award show for their 5th Highlander season. They also once hosted a Vaccinator Only cup. Who said that competitive people are boring, eh?